The Perfect Law Of Liberty

I did not
plan to say anything more on the subject of being “perfect” as Christians. However,
the subject has been troubling me ever since my last post.

This is
the whole premise of freedom in Christ: bondage to sin. This is the whole story
of freedom from slavery in the Old Testament.

We are
made in the image of God and we will never be walking in the freedom that
Christ died for us to have as long as we live to our flesh. A true
understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is our only salvation.

Thankfully,
I stumbled upon this amazing excerpt from Matt Chandler’s book, The Explicit Gospel. Any emphasis to the text has been purely mine:

The gospel is all
about God. What
He has done. What He is doing. What He is going to do.

The marker of those who understand
the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, when they stumble and fall, when they screw
up, they run to God and not from him, because they clearly understand that
their acceptance before God is not predicated upon their behavior but on the
righteous life of Jesus Christ and his sacrificial death.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of
behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not
removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another
place.

What ends up happening
to so many of us is that we spend so
much time trying to put sin to death that we don't spend enough time striving
to know God deeply, trying to gaze upon the wonder of Jesus Christ and have
that transform our affections to the point where our love and hope are
steadfastly on Christ. The goal is this: that Christ would become more
beautiful and desirable than the allure of sin."

Grace-driven effort is
violent. It is aggressive. The person
who understands the gospel understands that, as a new creation, his spiritual
nature is in opposition to sin now, and he seeks not just to weaken sin in his
life but to outright destroy it.

Out of love for Jesus, he wants sin starved to death, and
he will hunt and pursue the death of every sin in his heart until he has achieved
success. This is a very different pursuit than
simply wanting to be good.

It is the result of having transferred one's affections to
Jesus. When God's love takes hold of us, it powerfully pushes out our own love
for other gods and frees our love to flow back to him in true worship.